Magic Statistics

Former Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard says Quebecers don’t work hard enough.  How does he know?  The province’s debt has increased.  Oh, and the province has a poor “fiscal record”.  (Apparently that’s a euphemism for running consistently enormous budget deficits.)

The former Parti Quebecois leader argued in an interview with TVA that the province is lagging behind Ontario and the United States with its fiscal record, partly because its residents don't share the same work ethic.

He added that 75 per cent of the province's debt, the highest per capita in North America, was racked up during his generation.

That’s rich.  The province of Quebec has the highest income taxes in Canada, if not all of North America, and a former premier wonders why Quebecers don’t work hard enough.  Of course they don’t! The government grabs their earnings away from them.

I’d bet that Quebecers would work a lot harder if their income taxes were reduced.  Back to you, Lucien.

h/t: National News Watch

Previous related post: Quebec’s feeble economy is its own fault

Efforts to liberalise Russia’s economy have stalled for lack of government support, and now mobsters are trying to take control.  Last month, Andrei Kozlov, deputy chairman of Russia's central bank, was assassinated.  He had fought against criminal infiltration of Russia’s financial system and shut down corrupt banks.  Some ruthless folks apparently didn’t like that.

Then they took out a businessman who was in their way. 

Last weekend, with Russia's business community still buzzing over Kozlov's unsolved murder, Enver Ziganshin, the chief engineer for oil company Rusia Petroleum, was found dead at his country home. He had been shot three times, including once in the head.

Experts say these are just the latest in an escalating war for control of Russia's economy — one that pits organized crime against increasingly isolated and vulnerable reformers trying to bring the country's corporate sector into the modern age.

Instead of implementing serious economic reform, Russia seems to be returning to the bad old days of authoritarianism at home and intimidation abroad.

The Kremlin, meanwhile, has reverted to its old tactics of bullying neighbours, as it did with Ukraine last winter, and more recently with Georgia. Russia has been throwing its weight around through state-controlled oil and gas companies, renegotiating contracts with major oil companies like Shell, and raising alarm among a number of foreign governments, including Japan, Britain and the United States.

If Russia does not open up its economy, President Vladimir Putin will never fulfill his ambition of joining the World Trade Organisation.  But before that can happen, assassination of government officials and businessmen will have to be stopped and the rule of law restored.

Previous related posts:

• If Georgia goes down, Europe’s security will be at risk
• Democracy not on the agenda at meeting of world’s largest democracies
• Europe beholden to Russian energy supplies

The Lancet study purporting to find that over 650,000 Iraqis have died since the US-led invasion is so far out of line that anti-war site Iraq Body Count (IBC) has posted some “reality checks”.  Bottom line:  If the estimate published by The Lancet is accurate, then one or more of the following must have occurred.

• Incompetence and/or fraud on a truly massive scale by Iraqi officials in hospitals and ministries, on a local, regional and national level, perfectly coordinated from the moment the occupation began;
• bizarre and self-destructive behaviour on the part of all but a small minority of 800,000 injured, mostly non-combatant, Iraqis;
• the utter failure of local or external agencies to notice and respond to a decimation of the adult male population in key urban areas;
• an abject failure of the media, Iraqi as well as international, to observe that Coalition-caused events of the scale they reported during the three-week invasion in 2003 have been occurring every month for over a year.

In IBC's view, those implications are "extreme and improbable".

The refutation closes with an expression of regret that this controversy has diverted some of their limited resources away from more important work.

Read the whole thing.

h/t: Verum Serum

Previous related post: Lancet study of Iraqi deaths is statistically unsound and unreliable